UNION LOANS: MOB'S HOLD ON CASINOS By WALLACE TURNER Published: April 3, 1986 FACEBOOK TWITTER GOOGLE+ EMAIL SHARE PRINT REPRINTS About 10 years ago three mob bosses, Frank Balistrieri of Milwaukee, James Licavoli of Cleveland and Nick Civella of Kansas City, quarreled over the division of money they were illegally reaping from the Stardust Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. According to testimony in a recent Federal trial in Kansas City, Mo., they took their dispute for arbitration by Joseph John Aiuppa, the Mafia boss of all bosses in the Middle West. Angelo Lonardo, then Cleveland underboss who in those days was the recipient of up to $10,000 a month in illegally skimmed casino profits, testified about the incident: Q. After this resolution of the dispute between Kansas City and Milwaukee, did Chicago benefit in any manner? A. Yes, they did. Q. How was that? A. They got 25 percent of the money. It was just another routine transaction in organized crime's pervasive influence in Nevada gambling and in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, whose main pension fund served as a virtual bank for the mob. But law- enforcement officials cite its very routineness as a dramatic illustration of the ease with which they say the Mafia asserted control over the casinos and over the retirement funds of hundreds of thousands of laborers. The authorities contended for years that the teamsters were heavily corrupted, but law enforcers say that evidence assembled in recent investigations in Kansas City and elsewhere has provided a much clearer demonstration of the underlying methods of the organized crime network that fed off the teamsters' Central States, Southeast and Southwest Areas Pension Fund. Mr. Lonardo's testimony was one tile in the mosaic Federal prosecutors have pieced together over the past five years showing just how tenacious the mob's grip has been. Through testimony at the Kansas City trial and others, along with evidence gathered by the President's Commission on Organized Crime, law- enforcement officials have learned these things: * For at least two decades, until Federal pressure broke their grip in the late 1970's, crime leaders in the Middle West could dictate approval of multimillion-dollar loans from the Central States fund. * The mob used this power to bleed the borrowers. Loans to Las Vegas casinos were a favorite because they generated large amounts of cash that could be surreptitiously removed before entry into corporate accounts, where it would become subject to taxation and to legal control over its distribution. Or as Mr. Lonardo described this skimming process: ''You steal the money.'' * Mob bosses backed the election of Roy L. Williams as president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in 1981, and he promised, in return, to attempt to restore organized crime's influence over the pension fund. 2 Decades of Control Over Largest Union The huge stack of evidence shows that the grip of organized crime on the teamsters and the pension fund was far stronger and more pervasive than many people realized. ''Worst case'' expectations of mob domination of the unionwere not only met but surpassed. When a Federal or state legal action removed a key player from the game, a trained and sometimes more efficient replacement was sent in. The underworld's skill at maneuver and tenacity of purpose was clear: when the teamsters' pension fund management that had permitted the looting was removed, the criminals succeeded in selecting and electing their own candidate to head the union. Only the successful Federal prosecution of Mr. Williams for conspiring to bribe a United States Senator removed him from a position where he could fulfill the commitments he made to the mob bosses. In a memorandum to the court urging harsh sentences for the mob figures convicted in Kansas City, the Government said, ''The largest union in this country was corrupted at its very highest levels from, at least, the mid-1960's up through, at least, the fall of 1983 by the power of criminal groups.'' The memorandum, from the special Federal prosecutor, David B. B. Helfrey, also said that ''substantial portions'' of Nevada gambling ''were corrupted'' by these forces over the same period. In the last 10 days Mr. Aiuppa, John P. Cerone, Angelo LaPietra and Joseph Lombardo, all of Chicago, and Milton Rockman of Cleveland have been fined and sentenced to prison terms ranging from 16 to 28 1/2 years for conspiring to loot the Stardust, Fremont, Marina and Hacienda casinos. Evidence at the trial showed that the gangsters arranged for loans to buy casinos, then took control from the borrowers through intimidation and death threats. In this and other trials over the past few years, Federal prosecutors have used court-authorized tape recordings of telephone conversations and meetings, as well as testimony from conspirators who were trapped by the recordings and talked to get lighter sentences. Once such witness was Carl W. Thomas, who said he had been put into his Las Vegas casino management job by organized crime figures. He said there were different theories about how to skim, but he defended his own favorite method: go to the counting room, use a key no one knew he had, and take the money from the locked boxes. ''It may be old-fashioned, but there are no records,'' he said. ''There is nothing you have to sign, just take the cash. You walk out with it.'' On Nov. 26, 1978, Federal agents recorded a meeting in Kansas City where Mr. Thomas pointed out to Mr. Civella one problem with any system for skimming. ''Now the bad part about that system,'' he said, ''is that if they say they're taking $2,000 a day, they could be taking $2,400.'' At one point Mr. Civella was said to have shut down all skimming at the Tropicana casino in Las Vegas for two months to gauge profits so he could later judge how much was leaking away before reaching his hands. Trial Centered on Loan For Buying 4 Casinos Those happy days for the Cosa Nostra crowd began to fade after 1978, when the Labor Department's enforcement of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, together with pressure from the Justice Department's organized crime and racketeering section, forced resignations of the old trustees of the Central States pension fund. They were replaced by new management that refused to be manipulated by the gangsters and Allen Dorfman, a Chicagoan who performed liaison between the fund and the mob. Mr. Dorfman was installed in this role by James R. Hoffa, the former teamster president who was convicted of jury tampering and mail fraud and later disappeared, presumably murdered. Mr. Williams, who was a trustee of the pension fund from 1955 to 1978, testified that as Mr. Hoffa prepared to go to prison in 1967, he ''told us that he wanted Allen Dorfman to act as consultant to the fund while he was gone.'' ''I was never to a trustee meeting that Dorfman wasn't there,'' Mr. Williams said. Mr. Dorfman, convicted with Mr. Williams in 1983, was slain in a restaurant parking lot before he could be sentenced. The case in Kansas City where Mr. Williams testified was built around a loan of $62.7 million that Allen R. Glick got from the pension fund in 1974 to buy four Las Vegas casinos. Mr. Glick testified that he had gone to Frank Ranney, a pension fund trustee, who told him to see ''Frank Balistrieri, who lives here in Milwaukee and is very influential in pension fund affairs.'' Alvin Baron, assets manager of the fund, endorsed Mr. Ranney's appraisal of Mr. Balistrieri, Mr. Glick testified. Later, Mr. Baron was convicted of taking kickbacks on loans. Mr. Lonardo, the Cleveland underboss, described in his testimony his knowledge of the Glick loan. One fund trustee who supported it, according to Mr. Lonardo, was William Presser, father of Jackie Presser, the current president of the teamsters. Mr. Lonardo said that for several years William Presser, who is now dead, was paid $1,500 a month from the skimmed profits. Mr. Lonardo testified as a convict serving 103 years on drug law violations. The Government rewarded his testimony by making him eligible to apply for parole. Option to Buy Half For Little Money In testifying at the Kansas City trial, Mr. Williams, the former union president, said he was appearing as a Government witness in the hope of shortening his 10-year felony sentence for bribery. He said that in the 1950's, when he was sent to Kansas City to run a teamster local that was in trusteeship, he met every month with Mr. Civella, the mob boss there, for guidance. Mr. Williams described Mr. Civella, who died before he could be indicted in the casino skimming case, as ''very soft-spoken, a deep thinker and a very intelligent man.'' But he said he was frightened of him nonetheless. Mr. Williams said that he took Mr. Civella's directions in voting on the Glick loan application and that Mr. Civella sent him $1,500 a month for the next seven years. Among exhibits in the trial were records kept of payoffs to Mr. Williams and members of the Kansas City group that shared in the skimmed profits. Mr. Glick testified that as part of the price of getting the loan he was required by Frank Balistrieri to give an option to the Balistrieri sons, Joseph and John, that would let them buy half of Mr. Glick's Argent Corporation for $30,000. The company was worth more than $100 million.